What day is it?

It's Thursday?  What the heck?  How did that happen already?  

Last night turned out to be a good evening but not exactly a productive evening as I had imagined.  I did however get a little inspired for the ship design project for Mr. Froyd after reading an article he sent me.  It turns out my theories about space ship design back in high school were quite on the nose according to the physicist that wrote the article.  Balls.  Yes, balls.

The standard space fighter in popular culture is based on combat aircraft that we are used to.  Dogfights are action packed and make for good movies and television shows.  However they don't actually mesh up with what physics in space would allow.  The closest I've seen is Babylon 5, where the the little X shaped fighters would rotate rather than turn to achieve optimal firing position while they drifted along.  This is a good way to fight, however the ship designers didn't really make the ship the ideal shape for it.  Their ships were longer on the horizontal axis than the vertical axis.  This makes no sense because if you are using rotation to aim in a three dimensional space, you should have the craft be able to rotate to any point with the same amount of force and in the same amount of time.  A craft that isn't symmetrical along nearly every axis would then rotate at different speeds depending on which axis it is rotating on.  This is detrimental to training a pilot as they would have to learn all the various rotation rates of the craft.  If all the rotations possible take the same amount of time, the pilot can then simply deal with the disorientation of three dimensional space and will have increased reaction times.  So the best shape you can use to achieve this universal rotation time is a sphere.  Balls.

So I came up with a design in high school that was a center spherical cockpit that was surrounded by a ring connected to the cockpit on the Z and X axis.  I figured the outer ring would be the place to install the weapons and auxiliary engines.  You could then simply attach different outer rings to the central cockpit sphere for different missions or for rapid redeployment.  Also, if there was a problem, the pilot could simply disengage the out ring and fire the main engine.  The sphere alone would be a difficult target to hit and they would be leaving the ring packed with ammunition and possibly a remote detonator, essentially making it a space mine.  Neat.

Anyway.  I must go now.  Good day, sirs.  

Good day.

Froyd wins!

Sorry Lars...your prize is coming...I promise.

Wednesday of doom.

I get the feeling today that something really bad is going to happen.  I'm not sure what that will be exactly except that it will be unpleasant.  I'm not even sure why this is but it's just a feeling.  Be careful out there peoples...

No right answers as of yet, friends.  The battle continues.  

I attempted to work on some music last night but something just wasn't clicking.  I think it's the general 'blah' feeling I'm having this week that I just cant shake.  Last night I was working on the theme for the Avian faction and had a significant breakthrough.  The 'hi-line', as I like to call it when writing, was giving me troubles.  I was experimenting with different instruments to give things a dramatic tone but nothing was sounding right.  The problem of doing everything on the computer is that most orchestra instruments sound very synthetic when made on a synthesizer.  (Weird...I know.)  However, with my new keyboard with better velocity control, instruments that I had given up on before now sound perfect.  Success!  

With that bit solved I can wrap up the Avian theme and move onto a new one.  It's a little frustrating because I wrote the main theme in two days and I still think it sounds pretty good.  The Insect theme took just one good afternoon to write but the rest are bothering me.  I'll just have to get inspired I guess.  Anyone know any good movies about amphibians?

CLUE!!!!!!

Much like Notch and his Mojang empire, this company also started out as a home project that turned into a multi-million dollar powerhouse.  

Tuesday.

I'm going to have to start maximizing my time here for the next few months.  There's just so much to do!

- Head NSO for Babe City Rollers

- 3 Gaming Groups

- Write and produce a video game soundtrack

- Design and produce artwork for another video game

- Fix my house

- Work my job

- Keep up on my blog

- Finish my website

- Practice the drums

Too many projects!  Which is actually a good thing really.  I'm finding it better if I switch up projects a few times during the day to keep my mind fresh.  I find the quality of my work improves if I go in small, inspired spurts rather than long sessions.  The longer I work, the more my mind wanders to something else and my primary focus strays.  If I switch projects as my mind starts to wander then the new project gets my brains full power.  Having many options then works to my advantage in that I can switch many times and always have something new and fresh to stimulate my mind.  

Hopefully that's how it works otherwise there's going to be a lot I won't get done!  Terrible.

CLUE 2:

They helped give birth to a video gaming monster machine by taking a chance on a video game that people thought was too ambitious back in the day.

Back in Action!

Another week, a whole new contest.  First, however:  Video Games!

There is something very satisfying about doing well in a video game against somebody that usually beats the pants off you. Dai Senryaku VII is a great game and not for the faint of heart.  It usually takes a few days to even get close to deciding a winner and then it's usually decided by someone surrendering rather than being properly beaten.  After a few months of playing various scenarios, I finally had the moment where the tide was turning in my favor.  I haven't won yet, that's a ways off of course, but I am in a solid position.

Granted, I was set up in an amazing position to start with, randomly drawing America as my army.  Although my opponent got Russia, the only other well matched enemy, he did start at a resource disadvantage.  I didn't know the extent this would hurt him until the second day of playing where it became clear he couldn't afford to keep repairing his long range bomber fleet.  While he was scraping together every cent to get his fleet back in the air, I was producing waves of armor and support units with my superior cash reserves.  

I was still incredibly scared of what he had up his sleeve until I sent a recon force across the bridge to asses his full strength.  I was surprised to find the majority of his territory devoid of sentries and his out cities ripe for the picking.  His main force that I was slowly picking apart in the south was everything he had left.  It felt good.  Real good.

CLUE:

Alright.  Why don't we have a video game based week!  That will really get you guys excited I think

- 1979

Thursday.

Well the action is heating up here on the ol' prize blog with a ton of guesses but still no right answer.  Good luck with today's clue.  

Before we get to that however, let's take a few moments to think about water.  In a short time the large amount of snow we've had this year will start to melt and start the spring flood season.  I have a bad feeling that it's going to be a difficult one for many cities.  There are some that are used to flooding and others that are woefully unprepared.  I hope everyone is planning for the worst this year.

The best thing anyone can do is start preparing their houses for flooding.  If you live in a flood prone area you probably have an idea of how to do this but around here you may not.  I will be starting my prep soon to ensure a somewhat hassle free spring.  Although I don't live in a flood area, I do have a problematic foundation wall that let's some moisture through when it rains heavily and I can't imagine what is going to happen when all the snow starts to melt.  So it's prep time coming up to get the valuables to safety and do a bit of light work on the wall to prevent the worst.  

It's amazing how quickly you fill up a basement with stuff after you move into a house with one.  After living in small apartments for so long I couldn't believe how much stuff I suddenly had that could be hidden away in a basement.  It's crazy.  Alright...I've stalled long enough this morning.  Just had to torture you a little before giving you the clue.  (If nobody has this by the end of the day I will be surprised.)

Clue #4:

In October of 2012, it was announced they would be eligible as nominees for induction into the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame for 2013.  

Wednesday

So many guesses...so many wrong guesses.  I guess I should do music weeks more often if this is the sort of response I am going to get.  

Is it weird that I've become numb to being numb?  The deep freeze is back in Bemidji and this time I just don't care.  I used to curse every time I had to go outside and made such a grand entrance when I returned to the warmth of a heated building.  Now I just put on my hat and walk out.  No big deal.  It's at least above -20 F.  

When spring comes this year I'm going to cry a little I think.  

Clue!  Let's help narrow this down a bit!

After breaking up, two members of this group went on to have extremely successful and very different solo careers.  

Tuesday

Right.  Clue for the day.

Originally having 6 members, the group started to break up in 1989.

New Week!

I am a drummer and this weekend I finally have a set of drums again.  If you hadn't guessed, it's a Pearl.  It brought back some fun memories of high school and a few less interesting ones.  I once went to a jazz festival when I was in school and attended a percussion workshop that was terrible.  The instructor would bring students up on stage to play a little bit and then give them some tips on how to do it better.  The problem was he kept asking students to play things that they had no idea how to play.  

Some poor kid went up and the guy wanted to him to do some fills.  A short drum solo basically.  The kid floundered.  I could tell he was probably from a very structured program where technical drumming was drilled into his poor head.  Creative expression through drums just wasn't something he could do.  He could probably play you all the basic beats and styles but asking him to depart the norm was a stretch.  That was the program, learn the core skills and worry about creativity later.  It's not a bad way to do it, it's easier to paint with good brushes, if want an analogy.  The sad thing was, that's all I could do...drum creatively.  

I was called up to play some salsa beat thing.  Now, it's an important style musically...I get that.  As a session drummer it's just something you better know.  I was not a session drummer.  I was a high school kid that was self taught and in a very old school swing style jazz band.  I floundered as well.  It was horrible.  He couldn't believe that I hadn't been taught the 'basic' beats.  Well guess what:

IT'S NORTHERN MINNESOTA - WE DON'T SALSA HERE.

Seriously.  If you go to college and start expanding your musical horizons then you can get all excited about salsa, Cubano, Brazilian beats.  Fine.  It's cool.  They're interesting and fun to play apparently.  Unless you live in Florida then nobody really cares except for other music majors.  Jazz in northern Minnesota is big-band swing, the blues and classics like Miles Davis.  That's what we know and what a kid without formal training is going to know.  

In the end I think it's a sign of how people can get so wrapped up in their system they don't step back and realize that not everyone is in the same system.  Perhaps you could have asked those poor kids what their stronger skills were before choosing crap at random that they may or may not have any experience with.  At least I a got a free t-shirt.

THE CLUE OF THE DAY!  

Alright.  This weeks category is music!  

Clue #1:  

They changed the face of a major music style during the eighties and helped shed light on a growing problem in America.  

Is it Friday?

It doesn't seem like Friday for some reason.  It feels more like a Wednesday.  Odd.  

Anyway.  This weeks challenge for the prize was to decipher a small bit of code.  I may have made this a little more puzzling than I should have.  Which brings me to today's rant.

The better we become at something the harder it is for us to teach somebody else to do it.  Sounds backwards but it's not.  I see this a lot out in the real world with job training and especially in technology training.  A single task in a job is usually made up of a series of steps.  The more we do a task the less and less we thing about the actual steps and focus more on the task as a whole.  The smaller, more mundane steps in the task are performed reflexively and can be forgotten about when training others.

Say you're training someone to mop the floor at work.  Seems easy enough.  You tell them where the mops are kept, you tell them where the bucket filling station is and you instruct them on the basics of what areas of the floor need special attention.  Done.  Right?  There's nothing more to it than that.  Wrong.  Really?  Yes.  

Because you've mopped the floor a thousand times you really think it's that simple.  Get the mop, fill the bucket, mop the floor.  You forgot something however.  The sixteen year old kid you're training doesn't have the first clue on how to operate a commercial mop filling station.  Why would they?  It's not something they're going to run into in their daily lives.  There are a few valves that need to be in the right spot and the soap won't dispense unless you have them in the right positions.  If you get it wrong you're dumping floor wax instead of soap and making a huge mess.  

You didn't even think that this was something that needed explaining.  You don't even look at the valves anymore when you do it.  A few quick flicks and a slap of the button and glorious soapy water pours forth.  Simple...now.  But what about that poor kid back there dumping floor wax on his shoes?  You have failed him.

Anyway...with Friday here I will dump on your shoes the epic clue to get this thing going:

II   -AATTEE   -NO-

There....good luck.  

Blog attack.

The day is going better than I had anticipated.  The sun is shining and I have a new plan to get the home repair bug back in my veins.  If you don't know me, I bought my first house this year and it's amazing.  It's huge...really huge.  4 bedroom, 2 baths and lots of turn of the century charm.  Yes, we bought a 103 year old house.  Normally that's a huge no-no but it was honestly in amazing condition.  Except for one thing...

I began with gusto on a few things that needed some work on the house.  I reinforced the south-east corner floor joists and cleaned out the basement.  I braced the garage door opener and bought a nice outdoor broom.  I build a custom gaming table for my war room downstairs.  I was on a roll!  Then I found out my war room foundation wall is cracked and coming apart.  What a mess!  It took three days to clean out all the dirt and mess that had seeped in through the cracks and I was left with a sad looking wall.  My heart sank, my will was broken.  Major project that I wasn't expecting.  Boo.  

As spring approaches though I can feel the old bug coming back.  After some cooling off and talking to people we've learned it's not uncommon and lots people have the same problem in this area.  Not as terrible I guess as I thought it to be at first.  Feeling better I've started a list of little projects to get done.  I'm planning on working on the basement stairway and landing area first.  A little painting, some trim work and just the right amount of creative pipe hiding.  Nothing expensive or difficult.  

I'm excited.  My Ace Rewards card is going to get a workout. :)

ANOTHER HINT!!!!!!!!

Try writing it out over and over.  Maybe ten times in a row...the basic structure is simple when you crack it.

V-Day!

It's Valentine's Day.  A great day for kids to get seasonal candy and a horrible day for teenagers to get more awkward than ever.  For us older folks it's just another day to go to work.  Lame.  

In fifth grade our class had a Valentine's day box making contest.  I'm not sure if this is something many kids do in school but we would make boxes for our fellow classmates to drop their candy laden valentines day cards into.  A few friends and I decided to go big and talked to the janitor who was happy to supply us with some giant cardboard boxes.  We taped them together then decorated it as the Empire State Building.  We were pretty industrious kids.  It was about five feet tall and needed to be kept in the hallway outside the classroom because it didn't fit anywhere in the room.  Needless to say we won the award for best drop box.  

Good times.  

Crack the old code yet?  

Hint: 

AA

Evening!

I wonder if you need a license to become a small business consultant.  Didn't see much on the Googles but that doesn't mean much.  Those government agencies are tricky and get you in the end.

Star Trek!

I watched two Star Trek movies last night during my recovery from the endless shoveling.  (See...right there...last night shoveling on my netbook was only acceptable with two l's...wtf)  First Contact with the new cast is awesome.  There are a few dialogue issues; "Assimilate this!"  "You guys are on some sort of...star trek..."  "Resistance is futile!" (Data, during climax).  Seriously?  As my wife pointed out; there were many intelligent people in that production and didn't anyone think it was too cheesy?  I think actors who have been playing a part for over five years or more should be able to edit scripts to not ruin their characters.  

One of my favorite movies growing up was, Aliens.  Great movie.  James Cameron doing what he does best.  He takes an established hit movie and ramps it up a little then injects some capital to make a fantastic sequel.  

Aliens, Terminator 2...both epic sequels.  Anyway, that aside, Aliens was well done.  There are two really fantastic points in that movie where they put in just the right dialog for the moment.

Point 1:  Vasquez and Gorman are trapped in the air duct with aliens closing in on them.  Gorman pulls out a grenade and just before they detonate it, Vasquez says:  "You always were an asshole, Gorman."  It's a little cheesy but the actress really pulled off the scene.  (Insert her IMDB link here...)  Worked well and no cheesy heroic one-liner.  "Space marines all the way..." or something like that.

Point 2:  The most epic of all time.  "Get away from her, you bitch!"  Perfect.  Just perfect.  She's pissed!  She's standing in a robotic super suit, on a giant spaceship, fighting an alien and they didn't get trapped into using some hero line.  Good job.  There were a million lines they could have put in there to make Ripley more "heroine bad-ass" but instead they stepped back for a moment.  They actually considered that she is protecting a small girl who represents the daughter she lost on Earth.  Does a mother crack a one liner when her kid is being attacked?  Nope.  Just pure anger.  Brilliant.

Tuesday

I've always loved codes.  I can't say that I'm very good at breaking them but I do enjoy making them.  I found a book in grade school that explained the basics of writing in code and gave you a few simplistic ones to practice with.  It was targeted to the very young so the codes were simple alphabet substitutions but they did cover advanced codes a little bit at the end.  It stuck with me and later on in school I came back to it in order to help pass the time in less than interesting classes.

I came up with my own basic code based on one of the simple examples in the book.  It was easily breakable but I designed it more for easy reading rather than security.  I refined and practised until I could write it as quick as I could write normally.  It came in handy since I could write whatever I want around people and they would have no idea what it said.  Devious fun.

The other night I finally cracked the design of a new code I've been working on for a while now.  An art code really.  It's strange and I like it.  I just wanted to share that for some reason.  I'm a little tired tonight...too much shovelling.  Also...I think my netbook's spell check is locked on Canadian English...which is an odd mix of British and American spellings.  Crazy.

Sorry.

It's been a heck of a week so far.  Sorry for the lack of clues.  In place I have decided to give you guys a crack at decoding a few bits of text.  See what you can do:

Friday.

So one week has passed here and despite my hopes of wrangling some participation I seem to have failed to inspire the masses.  Maybe I'll do one more contest next week and see what happens.  Maybe I won't.  It's hard to compete with Facebook, memes, Reddit and the like.  

I'm not disappointed since it was a crazy idea to begin with.  The internet is a place to escape, especially when you're at work or school and have just a short break to do so.  Diving into a long rambling blog post isn't what you want, you want comics and games.  People want to pack as much entertainment into those free ten minutes as they can, flood the brain with colorful images to reset the mind for the next task.  It makes sense to me in a way.  I prefer to browse Reddit on lunch while I eat my soup because I don't have to think and it makes me chuckle occasionally.  Is that what we need?  

We are flooded with information at a rate unknown to humans in the past.  We absorb so much from the time we wake to the time we get a short break.  Everything is at our fingertips with a few quick button taps and screen flicks.  At work or school, technology is able to maximize our time by letting us view more information faster and includes sensory data that goes far beyond simple words on a page.  Graphs, 3D rendering, movie clips and audio can all be thrown at us in one short presentation.  Be it a work presentation or a class lecture, combining all these different things makes for a dazzling data overload.  Our brain needs short bursts of useless information afterwards, like a sonic toothbrush that cleans out the bits in our teeth from our chicken soup.  

So I guess I shouldn't get too worked up about people not taking the time to sit down and read a blog entry. I really shouldn't be writing all these posts before I finish my first cup of coffee in the morning anyway.  So next week perhaps I'll build a new sonic toothbrush for everyone.  

Last and Final Clue:  Phreaking (You all know how to use Google, right?  Free book for a Google search...)

It's morning...

Hello everybody.  Nice to see you today.

I'm really starting to get annoyed by memes.  I never expected them to last as long as they have since the internet is a pretty fluid place but they're still out there.  Normally things like memes evolve and change then disappear once people become bored with them.  They have not done so...and I'm grumpy about it.  

Why haven't they gone away?  Why have they become a terrible blight on the world wide webs?  Why do I continue to read them anyway?  It's because they're easy and quick.  They are a new form of comic that is compressed and compacted into a single panel, easily read on a smartphone screen without scrolling and new ones are easily made in a short amount of time.  

The meme itself is the internet's version of the inside joke.  They are built on a single picture that was incredibly entertaining once and now with each subsequent version they become watered down versions of that original.  Even though the new text on a certain meme may not be that witty, the humor of the original still echoes in our mind and we find it pleasing.  When a new one is made it's a lot like when old friends get together and someone says, "Remember that one night where we went to Taco Bell?"  Which causes the group to bust out laughing.  There is nothing funny about Taco Bell but if you're part of the group you suddenly get the joke.  (Yes...I just explained inside jokes.  Deal with it.)  

The problem with this format is that the meme inside joke system is like having all of your groups good times archived on Wikipedia.  Now anyone can learn what happened to Frank that night and then sit down and make some awkward joke about it and make everyone chuckle uneasily.  Way back before they were really 'memes' they were just fun things people put together to share with their internet friends.  Over 9000?  Unless you were actually a Dragon Ball Z fan back in the day that meant nothing to you.  Sure you can find the clip on YouTube but it's still not as funny if you don't know the show and the characters.  The inside part of the joke was just more complex back in the day I guess.

So...I guess what I'm trying to get at is that I'm a little disappointed in you internet.  I'm not feeling special and geeky anymore...and that makes me sad.

Clue #4:

Hack the Planet!  (Mathew Lillard is awesome.  SLC Punk, Hackers, Wing Commander.  Watch them.)

Wake up, it's not over yet.

Welcome to Wednesday everyone.  The clues are out but no correct answers yet. 

I had an epic idea last night that I failed to follow through on.  I was going to make a music video blog post for today but instead I learned a few things about the electrical wiring in my house.  Maybe for tomorrow?

Back to the internet!  Wait...we're on the internet...already.  Welcome back!  Aha!  I'm a little more out of it this morning than usual.  All the clocks in my living room stopped and I didn't know it had grown rather late last night.  Lack of sleep is a confusing thing.

One of the things that ruined me early on with the internet was that I grew up a big science fiction fan.  The things that people imagined for the internet back in the day were so promising and exciting.  It was a world of secret identities, epic adventure in the digital seas and a place where you could achieve greatness without leaving your room.  It was supposed to be a different reality that one could slip into and disappear from their own.  

Before the internet the big time geeks that were playing around with networks and hacking all went by code names.  They had separate digital identities and the concept was very appealing to me when the internet finally reached me.  I was the great Cokevampire, occasionally Ventola but never just plain old me.  That was boring.  The internet was a new world and as such I needed a new identity for it.  

This is one reason I am so frustrated by the current state of the internet as a whole these days.  It has become an extension of our regular reality.  There is no veil, no curtain, nothing to separate the two.  People who grew up with the internet don't view it as a playground but rather they treat it like we treated the telephone back in the day.  It's a communication device, a place to order pizza and there's no mystery to it all.  It's always on, always available in our pockets.  I miss the days of the dial-up modem where establishing a connection to the internet was like gaining clearance to an alternate reality.  You were tapping into the internet in those days but now we are just drowning in it.  

Clue #3:

Corn and Oats...corn and oats.

It's Tuesday!  

All this blogging has gotten me nostalgic for the good old days of the internet when it was still an unorganized mess.  The dark times, before the Google.  

No, it wasn't the dark times.  Actually in some ways I preferred it the way it was back in the day before business figured out.  Back when 'surfing' the web was actually a thing.  Remember that?  When there was no Facebook, Memebase.com, Wikipedia, YouTube or the like.  There were only home pages.  Useless, useless home pages.  They didn't do anything, you couldn't really interact with them but they were each a little unique slice of a persons life. 

Since you had to craft the page from the ground up, each one came out completely different.  Backgrounds, animated construction worker gifs, horrible color choices and poorly formatted text were standard.  More than that however was the information that people chose to put on those pages.  This was a page intended for the world to see, actually intended to be viewed by strangers.  It was more special that way I think.

With everything set in templates and pre-formatted structures these days we've all become the same.  We all 'like' Amazon.com; but that's not saying much is it?  We don't get a feel for a persons personality off a profile summary.  It's data, cold data and I imagine you get about the same impression about that person that an IRS tax worker gets from reading 1040's.  I miss knowing their favorite colors were maroon and pink despite it being a horrible choice for primary website colors.  There was life in those pages.

I've started working on my own, dusting off my meager web-design knowledge and playing around in an HTML editor just for fun.  One day it will go live...one day.  

Clue #2!!!!!

2600

This weeks mystery...

This is the first week trying out the mystery game portion of the blog and the first clue is up.  

"Blue and Gold is bold fashion statement..."

I neglected however to give you a category for our first mystery answer.  Mystery Thing / Person.  That's right...the mystery this week is both a thing and a person.  Just to confuse you more.  

This weeks blog posts will also have to do with this mystery thing/person.  (Sort of.)  It's not going to be easy.  I'm not giving these prizes away to just anyone.  So, get those brains working and the first to leave a comment on a blog post with the right answer gets the prize!  Good Luck.

Monday...

So today begins the journey to see who is out there. 

It's interesting to try and think of topics to write about this early in the morning when I'm still waiting for my coffee to work its magic.  Mostly I want to complain about the cold or make silly 'oh no it's Monday' type jokes but that's just wrong.  That's what Facebook is for.  

When Froyd, over at Froyd.net started blogging again I got excited.  He led the charge for us to break free of the generic existence that is popular social media.  It's great for a few things but overall I feel myself a little confused by the majority of peoples posts.  There's no meat to a two sentence long post and no personal touch.  Ignoring of course references to specifics; I wonder:  If you stripped away all the names from your Facebook feed; could you actually tell the people apart just by the few bits they've posted?  

The biggest problem is what Facebook has set itself up to be, intentionally of course, since they have to make money somehow.  They are a re-linking spot for all of the masses to 'share' content from other sites around the internet.  'Share' of course meaning 'free advertising'.  Watch this video, read this snippet, look at this funny picture.  It's like we're all digging through piles and holding up the bits of shiny to try to impress each other.  That would be fine if we put some personal opinion with it.  We tend to just grunt or exclaim a single word of praise or horror with the big, flashy picture and summary that Facebook automatically fills in when we paste the pre-formatted sharing link from the original site.  

I guess what I'm rambling on about is that social media hasn't made us social.  The moment anyone posts over three sentences of text we glaze over and TL;DR (too long; didn't read).  We don't want substance, the text won't fit on our smartphone screens.  Anyway...this is just a Monday rant and now if you've been paying attention, we come to the clue of the day:

CLUE OF THE DAY!

Monday, Clue 1:  Blue and gold is a bold fashion statement.

Morning.

Roller Derby.  Yes, it's coming back for the spring season and it's going to be interesting.  They made waves this winter by doing a pretty big tweak to the rules which I feel good about.  In the previous rule set, a skater could get a minor penalty for various little infractions which didn't do much to affect the game other than keep skaters a little more civil.  Now they've done away with those minor penalties and simplified things to hopefully make the matches run smoother.  

If you haven't checked out roller derby, I hope you will.  It's a good time, an interesting sport and just plain fun.  I could go on and on about how it's an all volunteer organization.  I could go on about how it's a way for a city to support a sport that isn't filled with scandals and over-paid crybabies.  That's a post for another day I think.  

Today let me just say that it's a sport where people get hit a lot and have lots of bad-ass attitude while doing it.  Sure you won't understand the rules...that's fine.  I've been a volunteer for two years now and I'm just starting to figure out the finer points of the game.  Go to YouTube and watch some instructional videos if you want to learn the rules or just go to a match.  By the end of the match you'll be picking out points and recognizing penalties.  There's always a neat, well designed, handsomely managed scoreboard to show you the score anyway.  (That's my department.)  

So yeah.  My plug for derby.  Do it.  Go.  Find a match out there and just go.  If you live in a bigger city they most likely serve beer at the match.  Neat.  If you live in a smaller city...well...just pre-game it at home and catch a cab.  (Don't drink and drive...)  

Well...now I'm ranting.  Your mission....should you choose to accept it.  Find me a picture of action figures battling on top of a computer tower like it was a skyscraper.  Bonus points if there's a helicopter involved...double bonus points if there's a wookie.

Chewbacca...what a wookie.  (Reference?)